


For the longest time

by kirinokisu



Category: Bleach
Genre: Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post 624
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-07-01
Packaged: 2018-04-07 04:36:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4249509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kirinokisu/pseuds/kirinokisu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being back from the dead and being alive are two different things. Only one requires adjusting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For the longest time

**Author's Note:**

> Some spoilers, but all very mild and vague since I've taken some liberties with canon, just because I could. (Also because it spans from Grimmjow's actual comeback to some mystical place post-canon.)

\- - -

The sands of Hueco Mundo are cold.

They seep in an out of his waraji as he walks, shift soundlessly under the weight, embrace soothingly in their silky chill.

There is no wind here and the dunes are eerily still, stretching out vast and endless. A lonely howl in the distance, echoing as it slowly dies out, and all is silent again.

Perpetual emptiness.

After crackling, fiery desperation of hell, Grimmjow is grateful for it.

\- - -

He reaches the ruins an infinity later. The tall white columns, broken and fallen to the ground. The rubble of stone walls, smashed down to rocks and pebbles. The circular towers, still standing guard to the heart of Las Noches.

The place is not empty, just as Grimmjow expects. With a feral grin, he tears every hollow apart, into shreds and pieces, and he does so with his bare hands and his bared teeth.

It is over in a blink and the only sign of a battle is hollow blood seeping into the white cold sand. Grimmjow sneers in disgust; so much blood for so little energy.

He wants to lay down and take a nap, not because he's tired, but because he can. Instead, he walks down the empty white halls, hunting those who aren't smart enough to flee. He doesn't reminisce, he simply passes the time—how much, it doesn't really matter.

Time is all he’s got now.

\- - -

He discovers them by accident.

They are dressed in white and they are eliminating hollows. Some they take with them, most they destroy, leaving no trace behind.

Their scent is strange, not simply human but not at all shinigami. Unfamiliar, unnatural. _Wrong_.

They smell like one of Kurosaki’s friends.

Grimmjow follows them for a while, keeping a careful distance and an even more careful grip on his reaitsu. He doesn't try to interfere.

And he doesn’t linger when he sees they’ve got Tres.

\- - -

The cat territory is empty, wiped out. There are corpses on the still white sand, some fresh, some eaten by lesser hollows down to bone marrow.

They are many, but Grimmjow knows there should be more.

He doesn’t go looking for them.

\- - -

The shinigami appears out of nowhere, with a smile that unnerves and eyes that hide under a striped hat.

Still covered in blood from his unfortunate encounter with the not-quite-humans, Grimmjow bares his teeth in a snarl when the intruder doesn’t try for an attack, doesn’t even make a move for his sword, if he has one.

“Grimmjow Jaegerjaquez,” the shinigami says. “What a pleasant surprise. A very pleasant one indeed.”

Grimmjow can’t sense any other reiatsu in the vicinity, doesn’t pick any traces of other shinigami so he figures he can spare this one a moment.

He can always kill him later. And if there are others, hiding, waiting, he will kill them too.

\- - -

He gets the gist of the story: Soul Society has fucked up and Soul Society is fucked up.

He doesn’t see what this has to do with him.

“Kurosaki Ichigo,” the shinigami says, and hides his face behind his fan.

Inside Grimmjow’s head, after an eternity of predatory silence, Pantera growls. A low, guttural noise that reverberates around his mind.

“He has acquired some very interesting powers recently,” the shinigami continues, eyes flashing in the dark.

Pantera growls again, and it is the most beautiful sound.

\- - -

On the outskirts of Primera’s territory, unexplainably undetected by the hungry eyes of the wolves, they pick up Tres, the former one.

Nelliel, as she tells him to call her.

Which is just as well; in this strange world where humans rule the desert, rank hardly matters. Even more so when Nelliel reports that she could not locate neither Primera nor Segunda, and that the lands are emptying fast, all around, all at once.

“It is up to just us to get rid of those invaders,” she says, and means it.

Hueco Mundo is their home.

\- - -

She don’t ask him how he is alive, if he ever was truly dead. He wouldn’t be able to give her an answer anyway.

\- - -

Kurosaki’s friends are in Hueco Mundo too.

They are a weird bunch and they care more about Kurosaki than they do about the world.

So the shinigami sends them off when Kurosaki needs them.

He doesn't tell Grimmjow to be patient, but he doesn't have to.

\- - -

Sometimes he dreams. The images are never clear, but the scorching flames in his lungs and the burning coal under his feet feel real, too real.

When he wakes up, the mess of scars on his chest ache in a dull throb.

It makes him want to destroy.

\- - -

The shinigami keeps coming and going, asks questions, makes notes, builds things. He makes them all work, even from a different world, from another dimension.

He brings more people with him, sends them away, brings them back.

Until Soul Society needs him and he is truly gone.

He still makes them work.

\- - -

And he keeps his promise. When the garganta is finally opened from the other side, Grimmjow is the first to step through it.

“Grimmjow,” Kurosaki exclaims, and falls into shocked silence. His hands grip his sword before he can properly process.

There is assuring steadiness in him now, visible to those who care to look. Not the certainty of a killer, but the calm of a fighter. The lack of hesitation.

Gone are the traces of human who was too weak to know who or what he was, of human who was terrified of his own power, of destruction in him.

Grimmjow’s fingers curl around Pantera.

His sword has changed too. Still massive, it’s strapped at his back, sheathed carelessly in cloth. And another one, at the hip.

They are steady too, strong like their wielder; finally, they are one and the same.

Grimmjow leers. “Yo, it's been fucking forever, _Kurosaki_.”

\- - -

They don’t get to fight right away, which annoys Grimmjow and for some weird reason amuses the cat woman to no end.

But Kurosaki is itching too, Grimmjow can see it. In the way he is always aware of Grimmjow's presence, in the poised tension of his spine, in the flashes of excitement that his eyes can't quite hide when they meet Grimmjow's. His hand twitches to the handle of the ebony blade sheathed at his waist, almost absent-mindedly at times; Grimmjow’s own fingers mirror the action every single time.

The unspoken promise of a good fight keeps them both pleasantly on edge. Grimmjow can’t wait, even as they fight the quincies.

\- - -

The holy palace of the Soul King. The place that made Aizen move heaven and hell, destroy everything in between, just to walk up these grand steps.

It stands in ruins now. Build on top of destruction, from destruction, with destruction.

Almost like Las Noches, but not quite.

The air here is different, threatening, crackling. Morphed by those who are not welcome here. Stained with their unnatural energy, their _wrongness_.

Kurosaki’s steps come to a halt beside him. “It's even worse in Soul Society.”

Grimmjow doesn't need to look to know that his fists are clenched tight enough to draw blood and that there is that pitiful look on his face, the look of someone who puts too much weight on his own shoulders and doesn't see how much he is already carrying.

_Fucking Kurosaki._

\- - -

It happens in a manner of a tidal wave.

They are fighting a horde of quincies and they stay behind as others—some reluctantly, some through clenched teeth—race on, up the narrow streets, down the quaking ground. Kurosaki stays because he can't mask his reiatsu for shit, and because it is his duty to protect, to shield. Him, just because.

So they fight, side by side, as the ground keeps shaking and the sky falls apart.

And then they are alone. Wild-eyed, drenched in blood and gripping their swords, they are alone.

They clash with a metal clink of their blades and a tangible spark of their reiatsu. Metal meets metal, slashes air, pierces flesh. Stone and brick rains around them like a downpour, and the sky is falling too.

Through the adrenaline that clouds his eyes, Grimmjow sees that Kurosaki’s eyes are the same. Gone is the worry for friends and family and the whole damn world. Gone is the crippling weight of responsibility that pisses Grimmjow off so much whenever he sees it slow Kurosaki down. Gone is the guilt.

Grimmjow snarls, and the blood surges in his veins, alive.

\- - -

His blade meets concrete with a brilliant spark and grazes Kurosaki’s cheek hard enough to tear the skin.

Panting heavy, they don’t move. They don’t speak. _They understand._

They could kill each other. Here, right now, or later, someplace else, they could do it, if they wanted. Grimmjow doesn’t.

And Kurosaki, he has come to slowly realise, never really has.

\- - -

The shinigami win, as they always do. Grimmjow doesn’t care.

He goes back to Hueco Mundo, back home. It greets him like it always does—with a black sky void of stars, a pale halo of the moon and a vast, still expanse of the sand.

He sticks with Nelliel for a while. Together they get rid of the last remnants of quincy forces, slay an occasional Vasto Lord, don't really look for survivors.

As agreed, never officially of course, the shinigami don’t step into this world anymore.

Life returns to what it has been, before everything.

\- - -

In the end, it is Nelliel who sends him back to the world of living. She dares to pull rank on him, for the second time in the long span of their acquaintance.

Grimmjow snarls and hisses and challenges, but is ultimately forced to obey.

He ambushes Kurosaki on the way home, when his weird human friends have all bid their goodbyes. He sneaks from behind and throws a casual arm around Kurosaki’s shoulders. Grimmjow knows he can’t feel the physical contact or the breath fanning across his cheek while in human form, but he must feel the rush of reiatsu Grimmjow stops suppressing.

Kurosaki whirls around and apparently miscalculates the distance between them because Grimmjow’s name dies on his lips in a stunned whoosh of air.

His face is terribly red.

“Grimmjow!”

“Missed me, Kurosaki?” The name rolls easily off his tongue, familiar, _exciting_.

Kurosaki blushes harder and scowls angrily, but doesn’t deny nor confirm.

He smells different today, Grimmjow notes. More human. But still with familiar traces of shinigami, and quincy, and hollow.

On an instinct, Grimmjow leans closer and takes a sniff. The scent is stronger like this, when the tip of his nose is almost touching the skin of Kurosaki’s neck.

“Your mug’s red, by the way,” he informs.

“Go to hell.”

Grimmjow feels downright smug when he proudly says, “Been there, done that. Didn’t like.”

Kurosaki stiffens. It takes some effort to convince him to ditch his physical body and follow Grimmjow to Hueco Mundo for a spar.

\- - -

They develop a routine of sorts, one that Grimmjow denies.

So when he finds himself perched on Kurosaki’s windowsill on a humid, heady summer evening, it is because he is bored. Not because it feels like a promise, like responsibility, _like normalcy_.

“Fight me, Kurosaki.”

As per usual, Kurosaki grumbles and sighs and _looks_ but goes through the garganta anyway when Grimmjow opens it.

\- - -

It excites Grimmjow that no matter how often they fight, no matter for how long, the thrill of it never wanes.

Sometimes they fight with their swords, sometimes they crash buildings and destroy lone trees, and sometimes they let go all the way, giving their hollows free rein.

After one such time, with his shihakusho in tatters and blood gushing from his chest, Kurosaki falls asleep right there on the cool desert sand.

Grimmjow feels like he should be offended and slit Kurosaki’s throat to teach him better. But his skin is still tickling with excitement and his blood is thrumming in a different kind of thrill—calmer, steadier, but addicting all the same.

He licks his wounds in silence and lets Ichigo sleep.

\- - -

Grimmjow doesn’t know what brought him back, doesn’t question neither the _hows_ nor the _whys_ ; he is alive.


End file.
